Is Gsu apparel Made in Sweatshops?
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“Is GSU Apparel Made in Sweatshops?”: The Student Anti-Sweatshop Campaign at Georgia State University A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University
by Takamitsu Ono Committee: ________________________________ Dr. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Chair
________________________________ Dr. Charles L. Jaret, Member
________________________________ Dr. Ian C. Fletcher, Member
_________________________________ Date
__________________________________ Dr. Ronald C. Reitzes Department Chair Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….4 A Methodological Consideration………………………………………………….8 Chapter 1 Globalization……………………………………………………………..11 Clarifying the Meanings of “Globalization”……………………………………..11 Cultural Globalization……………………………………………………14 Political Globalization…………………………………………………...18 Economic Globalization…………………………………………….……21 What Are “Sweatshops”?………………………………………………………..41 Accounting for the Emergence of Sweatshops…………………………..49 Resisting “Globalization from Above”………………………………………….58 The Global Anti-Corporate and Anti-Sweatshop Movements…………..60 Some Effects of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement………………………...67 Chapter 2 Students Organizing for Economic Justice in the 1990s and Beyond…...73 Growing U.S. Campus Activism for Economic Justice in the 1990s……………73 United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)……………………………….…..75 Chapter 3 The Anti-Sweatshop Campaign at Georgia State University………..…..88 The Emergence of the Campaign………………………………………………...88 Into the Campaign………………………………………………………………..91 Georgia State University and Sweatshops……………………………….92 Campaign Goals………………………………………………………….96 Campaign Rationales…………………………………………………...101 Campaign Strategy……………………………………………...………104 Mobilizing Structures and Tactics……………………………………...109 Framing and Ideology…………………………………………………..123 Representations of Workers…………………………………….124 Representations of Corporations and the Global Economy…….131 Representations of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Fair Labor Association (FLA)………………….134 Representations of Ourselves as a Campaign…………………..136 Representations of Related Issues……………………………...139 Collective and Individual Identities…………………………………….140 Political Opportunity Structures………………………………………..145 Some Campaign Outcomes……………………………………………………..157 Accounting for the Outcomes…………………………………………………..162 Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………..180 Summary………………………………………………………………………..180 Prospects and Concluding Remarks…………………………………………….184 References………………………………………………………………………………188 Appendix I E-mail Interview Questions……………………………………….……225 Appendix II Basic Timelines of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement, United Students Against Sweatshops, and the Anti-Sweatshop Campaign at Georgia State University………..233 Appendix III A Comparison of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Fair Labor Association (FLA)………………….………..……..239 Appendix IV Basic Descriptions of Some Flyers and Campaign Materials………….241 “‘Workers of the World Unite!’ will become more than just a hackneyed slogan; it’ll become the only way to survive.”
Introduction Seattle, Washington D.C., Davos, Quebec City, Prague, and Genoa: Many people have become familiar with these cities’ names because the cities, perhaps unhappily, hosted some of the major “anti-globalization”2 or global justice demonstrations in the recent history. How about these names: Durham, Madison, Eugene, Middlebury, Tucson, and Atlanta? These are some of the American cities where one can find campus-based student anti-sweatshop campaigns launched by chapters of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). In fact, this student anti-sweatshop movement has been an integral part of the larger global justice movement and has arguably been no less important than those better known global justice demonstrations, though involving fewer participants. This student movement to improve poor working conditions in factories around the world where college-logoed apparel is produced spread like a wildfire to as many as 200 campuses across the United States and Canada over the last several years (Featherstone and United Students Against Sweatshops 2002). Its intensity and size drew wide media attention. The New York Times referred to it as “the biggest surge in campus activism in nearly two decades” (Greenhouse 1999b). Other observers said it is “the largest wave of student activism to hit campuses since students rallied to free Nelson Mandela by calling for a halt to university investments in South Africa more than a decade ago” (Appelbaum and Dreier 1999:71). I have been associated with United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) since 1999, engaging in the campaign at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta. A small group of students and supporters have been out on campus to raise awareness of the problem of sweatshops and their relationship to the GSU-licensed apparel sold in the two bookstores and worn by some staff members and athletes of Georgia State University. We have tried to pressure the GSU administration to take steps to minimize the possibility in the future that the GSU apparel is manufactured under inhumane working conditions in this country or abroad. As the current form of globalization encourages the GSU licensees to outsource the clothing manufacturing process to hundreds of factories around the world, consumers and students at GSU are linked with the people around the world who sew the GSU clothing. Equipped with some benefits of globalization, such as Internet and e-mail, the activists at GSU have tried to institute a system at GSU so that violations of basic human and workers’ rights can be minimized at GSU licensees’ contracting factories across the globe. The activists also developed an awareness of this issue as a part of the globalization process and cultivated a sense of solidarity with workers in apparel producing regions. This thesis is a sociological attempt to define this still on-going collective activity as a part of a larger global social movement. First, I will clarify the phenomenon called “globalization” in its cultural, political, and economic manifestations. But, as the current form of globalization creates injustices, inequalities, and undemocratic governance around the world, countless people have stood up to resist them – some more visible and successful than others. I will in particular demonstrate how contemporary globalization since the 1970s has generated and maintained sweatshops and how people around the world, though focusing on the ones in the United States, have resisted in the movement against sweatshops. We will also look at some effects of this anti-sweatshop movement.
I will describe and analyze how and why the GSU anti-sweatshop campaign began, how it has sustained itself for two years, and how it has created some effects and why. In doing so, I will look into some analytical concepts of social movements. These include: (a) mobilizing structures (a network of supporters, resources we have generated, and tactics and strategies we have tried to carry out); (b) framing and ideology; (c) identities and emotions; and (d) political opportunity structures (opportunities to advance or hinder our goals in the GSU power structure). I will then identify and try to explain some effects of this campaign on the GSU community and the campaign activists. I will close the thesis with speculation about the future of this GSU campaign. My argument is that the GSU campaign has not met with success in attaining its goals primarily because, despite its diligent efforts, it has to this date failed to build strong mobilizing forces on campus to compel the GSU administration to accept or make concessions to our demands. A solid mobilizing structure could have created favorable political opportunities for the campaign to help attain our goals. I demonstrate that a number of factors have prevented the formation of strong mobilizing structures. They include class and racial backgrounds of the GSU students, their weak identification with GSU, the commuter school setting of the campus, the lack of progressive political culture at the university, the lack of direct evidence connecting sweatshops with GSU, the lack of economic resources to invite outside speakers, and the limitation of the main organizer of the campaign. In the study of social movements, it is important to account for the “failure” as much as the “success” of a given movement. I hope that this thesis will contribute to the understanding of social movements by examining why the GSU campaign has not been successful yet. A Methodological Consideration With regard to my research method, I directly participated as the main organizer in the activities of the anti-sweatshop campaign at Georgia State University. I actively participated in all of our meetings and other activities, including informational tabling and teach-ins. This is a form of participant observation, or observing the phenomenon under study while participating in such a phenomenon. Specifically, I was basically a “participant-as-observer” (Babbie 1995:284), once I decided to study this campaign. In other words, I directly observed the phenomenon under study while actively and genuinely participating in such activities as a full participant while notifying other participants that I was also engaged in research and observation. Soon after I decided to research the campaign for my thesis perhaps in the early spring of 2001, I notified to all regular participants and many temporary participants, but not GSU administrators we came to contact with, that I was researching on it. I did so by notifying them verbally in an informal way or/and later by e-mailing them to ask to answer questionnaires. Some may raise the question of objectivity. That is, by actively participating in a phenomenon the researcher is observing, the researcher may “go native” or identify with the viewpoints and interests of participants and lose the attitude of detachment to conduct a research objectively (Babbie 1995:284). I defend my position at two levels. One is the myth of total objectivity of the researcher. As many scholars of science studies and epistemology have demonstrated, any research is always influenced by power-laden specific historical, cultural, political, institutional, biographical, and situational contexts and practices as to what and how the researcher can(not) or should(not) “see” and report (Brown 1993; Daly 1997; Fuller 1997; Harding 1998; Seidman 1996; Sprague and Kobrynowicz 1999; Van Maanen 1988). However, it does not mean that any research attitude will do just because all research is power-laden and not completely objective. While acknowledging the limitations, any scientific research should be conducted with an attitude of being critical, reflexive, and ethical about assumptions, behaviors, and consequences of the researcher and the research (Hertz 1997). It also suggests that multiple and critically reflexive perspectives and methods can be used to generate accounts to best understand the “reality” under study since there is no method to grasp the unchanging, unshakable Truth. Second, I think this argument of employing multiple perspectives and methods supports the use of the direct participant observation method because it has an advantage to understand a “reality.” Because of my full involvement in the campaign, it can be argued that I can construct a closer appropriation of the reality, in contrast to a researcher who does so from outside a direct context. Although, as I mentioned, I revealed to other participants at one point that I was studying this campaign, I believe that the influence on the participants to change their “natural” behaviors has been minimal. It is because I have been the main figure in the GSU campaign, and because I believe I did not change myself in any noticeable way in the campaign as a researcher. In recollection, while involving in the campaign activities, I often even forgot that I was actually researching. In this sense, I suspect other participants were not too conscious of being observed to change their “natural” social behaviors. It is also partly because I did not tell them that I was researching on the campaign every time I met them, or I did not post an e-mail, indicating my research every time I posted a message on the campaign e-mail listserv (i.e., I notified them only once or twice). I do not believe either that I asked formal “research questions” to the participants or even took notes solely for my research during our campaign activities so that the participants may have sensed some awkwardness and might have changed their behaviors. I also examined other primary and secondary campaign materials. They include the messages of most e-mails posted on two e-mail listservs that the GSU campaign used,5 campaign literature, an e-mail survey to a number of active participants in the campaign (see Appendix I), and media accounts of the campaign. Much of the accounts came from my memory. With these materials, I can trace the chronology of the GSU campaign and analyze some sociological dimensions. Fundamentally, this research might be to grasp what sociologist Michael Burawoy (2000) calls “grounded globalizations” (p. 341) of the participants. In other words, it is to reconstruct “real,” grounded experiences of people or actors in their global spatial and temporal contexts, guided by particular theoretical and ideological frameworks. Chapter 1 – Globalization Clarifying the Meanings of “Globalization” The term, “globalization,” became the buzzword of the 1990s in many parts of the world, including the United States, three decades after the word appeared in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language in 1961 (Scholte 2000:43). The term has been used in and out of academia, but the meaning of the word varies depending on who uses it. This pattern of multiple meanings holds true even in social science in the western world, which has produced a mushrooming number of publications on this topic over the last decade (Guillén 2001:235), based on academic disciplines and theoretical and ideological perspectives (see Guillén 2001; Held and McGrew 2000; Kellner 2002; Nash 2000:47-99; Robertson 2001; Sassen 1998; Scholte 2000).6 Although there are many theoretical and ideological conceptions of “globalization,” many concur that the phenomenon of “globalization” is not new if the term is loosely defined as “a process leading to greater interdependence and mutual awareness (reflexivity) among economic, political, and social units in the world, and among actors in general” (Guillén 2001:236). Carruthers and Babb (2000:182-85) point out, for example, the existence of ancient kingdoms and empires as well as “world” religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, many centuries ago. Immanuel Wallerstein ([1983] 1995) analyzed inherently expanding capitalism around the globe since the 15th century. This world system of capitalism has been predicated on the international division of labor – “core” and “peripheral” states, which rely on each other to accumulate capital relentlessly in favor of the “core” states while “semi-peripheral” states being autonomous. He also argues that capitalism creates an ideology of universalism, which is to justify self-interested rationalization as Truth (Wallerstein [1983] 1995:80-82). Jan Aart Scholte (2000:44-56) introduces several conceptualizations about “globalization” and argues that “internationalization,” “liberalization,” “universalization,” and “westernization” are not new (see also pp. 62-88 for a long history of globalization based on his notion of “supraterrotoriality,” which is discussed below). As to the “internationalization” of cross-border activities of people, goods, ideas, and interactions, Scholte (2000:15, 44) refers to the oft-cited 1996 book, Globalization in Question, by Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson to point out that the degrees of cross-border migration, direct investment, finance, and trade in the late nineteenth century West were proportionately equivalent to those of the current era. “Liberalization” or deregulation of government laws to create an “open” world economy is redundant because of earlier times of widespread liberalization like the third quarter of the nineteenth century (Scholte 2000:45). He also considers “universalization” as old if it is defined as “the process of spreading various objects and experience to people at all corners of the earth” (p. 16). He cites the transcontinental spread of human species starting a million year ago, world religions, and transoceanic trade for evidence (p. 45). Further, “westernization,” “modernization,” or “Americanization” is not new if we consider imperialism and colonialism. Scholte (2000) contends that only “supraterritoriality,” “deterritorialization,” or “a proliferation of social connections that are at least partly – and often quite substantially – detached from a territorial logic….” (p. 47), is distinctively new in the contemporary phase of globalization in the last several decades (pp. 46-50). This supraterritoriality or “transworld simultaneity and instantaneity” (Scholte 2000:49) manifests in areas of communication (e.g., Internet and fax), markets (e.g., global commodities like Coca-Cola), production (e.g., transborder intra-firm trade within a global company), finance (e.g., “a round-the-world, round-the-clock foreign exchange transactions” [p. 52]), money (e.g., “global” currencies like U.S. dollars, and withdrawal of money from thousands of ATMs in local currencies across the world), organizations (e.g., transborder business coalitions through joint ventures, subcontracting, and franchises), social ecology (e.g., ozone depletion), and consciousness (e.g., the notion of the “global village”) (pp. 50-56). Beside the debate on the newness of globalization, some analytical distinctions concerning globalization can be made based on its cultural, political, and economic aspects. I summarize each of these below. Cultural Globalization “Cultural globalization” deals with “the displacement, melding, or supplement of local cultural traditions by foreign or international ones” (Carruthers and Babb 2000:182), “principally as a result of the mass media, but also because of flows of people in migration, tourism, and the emergence of ‘third cultures’ associated with the personnel of global economic and political institutions (Nash 2000:52-53).7 This results in changes in practices and meanings of “local” life, including the sense of self, human relations, and citizenship (Nash 2000:52-53). However, it is much more contentious how exactly and to what extent these changes occur (Guillén 2001:252-54). At the one end, many argue that the change has been to homogenize local cultures around the world, especially in the mold of American culture, even though few would argue for the existence of a single world culture, as Nash (2000:71) suggests. The global village, Americanization, monoculture, McWorld, Coca-Colonization (Nash 2000:84), and McDonaldization (Ritzer 1996) are terms often used to express this view. Many analysts, particularly Marxian scholars, attribute the cause of homogenization and standardization to commodifying, marketing, and profit-making practices of global capitalism by global corporations and corporate media (Applbaum 2000; McChesney 2001; Tomlinson 1999:81-88). Others say that they are an effect of modernity in more general (Guillén 2001:251-52; Nash 2000:65-67; Tomlinson 1999:89-97) Turning Point Project, a coalition of U.S. progressive activist organizations, for example, created a series of advertisements that criticized corporate globalization. One of their advertisements in the late 1999, titled “Global Monoculture,” began with these sentences to criticize homogenizing effects of economic globalization: A few decades ago, it was still possible to leave home and go somewhere else: the architecture was different, the language, lifestyle, dress, and values were different. That was a time when we could speak of cultural diversity. But with economic globalization, diversity is fast disappearing. The goal of the global economy is that all countries should be homogenized. When global hotel chains advertise to tourists that all their rooms in every city of the world are identical, they don’t mention that the cities are becoming identical too: cars, noise, smog, corporate high-rises, violence, fast food, McDonalds, Nikes, Levis, Barbie Dolls, American TV and film. What’s the point of leaving home?
TV is capable of unifying thoughts, feelings, values, tastes and desires to match the needs of the institutions who send the images. These are giant corporations, whose ideals of Utopia are invariably commodity-oriented, urban, technology-oriented, and indifferent to nature. The net result is a homogenized mental landscape that nicely conforms to the franchises, freeways, suburbs, highrises and clearcuts of an [sic] homogenized physical world (emphasis original). As a result: The act of sitting and watching TV is quickly replacing other ways of life and other value systems. People are carrying the same images that we do, and craving the same commodities, from cars to hairsprays to Barbie dolls. Television is turning everyone into everyone else. It’s cloning cultures to be like ours. In his popular book, The McDonaldization of Society, a noted social theorist, George Ritzer (1996) similarly contends that modern everyday life in many parts of the world is increasingly operating on four principles that dictate the management of fast food restaurants: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. It has occurred not only in restaurant businesses, but also in education, work, health care, leisure, politics, families, and sex. These “rational” principles, however, inevitably produce “irrationality of rationality” – deskilling, prepackaged or standardized choice, erosion of authenticity, environmental degradation, among others (see also Ritzer 2002). Download 0.77 Mb. Share with your friends:
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